{"title":"Books by Robert Crawford","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781529925456","title":"Eliot After The Waste Land","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eThe second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in \u003ci\u003eYoung Eliot\u003c\/i\u003e. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThis long-awaited second volume, \u003ci\u003eEliot After 'The Waste \u003c\/i\u003e\u003ci\u003eLand'\u003c\/i\u003e, tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFrom his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of \u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/i\u003e, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eHe explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work \u003ci\u003eFour Quartets\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eRobert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44581274255538,"sku":"9781529925456","price":14.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781529925456_87902f9d-b8ea-46db-bdd8-7c481d1a4898.jpg?v=1786023507"},{"product_id":"9781787334564","title":"Old World","description":"\u003cb\u003eTraversing the globe, \u003ci\u003eOld World \u003c\/i\u003eis a generous, playful collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed' \u003ci\u003eSunday Herald\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, \u003ci\u003eOld World\u003c\/i\u003e explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThese poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e‘A poet of great importance… fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ \u003ci\u003eScotsman\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e'In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ \u003ci\u003eHerald\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":55206089654645,"sku":"9781787334564","price":13.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781787334564.jpg?v=1786034676"},{"product_id":"9781787330689","title":"The Scottish Ambassador","description":"\u003cp\u003eOne of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe Scottish Ambassador \u003c\/i\u003efuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHe negotiates with intensity and wit between a deep sense of human universals and a heartfelt fidelity to individual places. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular – and the particularly Scottish. At the book’s centre is a series of intimate, funny, eloquent portraits of cities which are at once remarkable public poems and outpourings of love.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56305089511797,"sku":"9781787330689","price":10.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781787330689_e82eaaf9-1526-442b-b1d2-ca6aaf43ccec.jpg?v=1786025717"},{"product_id":"9781844139309","title":"The Bard","description":"\u003cp\u003eNo writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in \u003ci\u003eThe Bard\u003c\/i\u003e. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of  untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves and struggles of the great poet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eWith a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible élan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, \u003ci\u003eThe Bard\u003c\/i\u003e is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive, intelligent biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compels the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56307796377973,"sku":"9781844139309","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781844139309_b9cbcb01-d711-4817-8999-2e8141080361.jpg?v=1786027843"},{"product_id":"9780099554950","title":"Young Eliot","description":"\u003cp\u003ePublished simultaneously in Britain and America to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the death of T. S. Eliot, this major biography traces the life of the twentieth century’s most important poet from his childhood in the ragtime city of St Louis right up to the publication of his most famous poem, \u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land\u003c\/i\u003e. Meticulously detailed and incisively written, \u003ci\u003eYoung Eliot\u003c\/i\u003e portrays a brilliant, shy and wounded American who defied his parents’ wishes and committed himself to life as an immigrant in England, authoring work astonishing in its scope and hurt. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eQuoting extensively from poetry and prose as well as drawing on new interviews, archives, and previously undisclosed memoirs, Robert Crawford shows how Eliot’s background in Missouri, Massachusetts and Paris made him a lightning conductor for modernity. Most impressively, \u003ci\u003eYoung Eliot \u003c\/i\u003eshows how deeply personal were the experiences underlying masterpieces from ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ to \u003ci\u003eThe Waste Land. \u003c\/i\u003eT. S. Eliot wanted no biography written, but this book reveals him in all his vulnerable complexity as student and lover, stink-bomber, banker and philosopher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56311554376053,"sku":"9780099554950","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780099554950_48355935-ee14-476d-9c4d-2ac6ba95982f.jpg?v=1786011738"},{"product_id":"haiku-1","title":"Haiku","description":"The story of haiku’s global journey, from Japan to every culture and languageA century and a half ago, almost no one outside of Japan had heard of the haiku. Even in Tokyo some people regarded these tiny poems with disdain. Today they are the world’s most widely known poetic form, cherished and reviled in equal measure. At their best, haiku are highly attentive to the moment and describe the world with pinpoint accuracy; at their worst, they can be trite and cloyingly cute.   How did these diminutive, seventeen-syllable poems come to pervade global culture?Acclaimed poet and critic Robert Crawford charts the haiku’s journey across the world, from Japan to nineteenth-century New Jersey, London, and California—and on to twenty-first-century Senegal and Brazil. We see the early experiments by contemporaries of Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle, grapple with Ezra Pound’s modernist haiku, witness their transformation by Rabindranath Tagore and the Beat Generation, and newly appreciate the globalised, digital form we know today.   In Crawford’s hands, the story of the haiku is the story of international literary exchange—and a resounding celebration of poetry and translation.","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57499341783413,"sku":"9780300290127","price":25.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9780300290127.jpg?v=1791212865"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/author-robert-crawford.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}